In recent years, a silver halide photographic light-sensitive material has been desired to have the characteristics such as a rapid processability, a high image quality, an excellent processing stability, a low cost, and so forth. Among those light-sensitive materials, a rapidly processable silver halide photographic light-sensitive material has been demanded in particular.
As one of the methods for obtaining such a light-sensitive material, it has been known that a color processing is made more rapid by making use of such a silver halide emulsion as that of silver chloride or silver chlorobromide which has a substantially high silver chloride content. For example, the technologies applicable to the above-mentioned method are described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,183,756 and 4,225,666; Japanese Patent Publication Open to Public Inspection (hereinafter referred to as Japanese Patent O.P.I. Publication) Nos. 55-26589, 58-91444, 58-95339, 58-94340, 58-95736, 58-106538, 58-107532, 58-107533, 58-108533 and 58-125612; and So forth.
Meanwhile, in a silver halide color photographic light-sensitive material, a light-sensitive silver halide emulsion and a coupler so-called dye-forming coupler capable of forming a dye upon reaction with an oxidized aromatic primary amine developing agent are generally used. Among those couplers, phenol or naphthol-type coupler has popularly been used so far in a cyan coupler, of which are described in, for example, U.S. Pat. Nos. 2,369,929 and 2,474,293. The cyan dye images obtained by making use of phenol- or naphthol-type coupler have had serious color reproduction problems raised by having an unsatisfactory sharp-cut spectral absorption in the short wavelength region of the cyan dye and by having an unnecessary absorption in the green spectral region thereof. For the purpose of solving the above-mentioned problems, an unnecessary absorption correction has so far been tried on negative light-sensitive materials by means of masking or the like. However, such a correction has not been preferable, because the sensitivity of the light-sensitive material has been lowered. While, in the case of reversal type light-sensitive materials or printing papers, there has been no measure for the correction. It has been the present situations where a color reproducibility has been affected considerably.
Taking the above-mentioned situations into consideration, imidazole type cyan couplers each having a novel structure have been proposed in, for example, Japanese patent application Nos. 61-138,868, 61-38,869 and 61-261,488, and so forth. Those cyan couplers are excellent in the spectral absorption characteristics of their cyan dyes formed. To be more concrete, they have excellent characteristics such as a sharp-cut spectral absorption in the short wavelength region, a few unnecessary absorption in both green and blue regions, a high maximum density obtained by a high absorption coefficient of the cyan dye, and so forth.
However, when combining the above-mentioned silver chloride emulsion or a silver chlorobromide emulsion having a high silver chloride content and an imidazole type cyan coupler, for the purpose of preparing a rapid processable light-sensitive material, it was found from the studies made by the present inventors that fog was seriously increased and photographic characteristics of a raw sample were liable to be varied during the storage of the sample on standing. It has, therefore, been difficult to prepare a rapid processing type photographic light-sensitive material containing a cyan coupler capable of displaying excellent characteristics.